Mirror, mirror on the wall
who's the most wicked of them all?

Putin.

I have an idea!
Let’s do something
Really, really original.

Let’s get an Olympic Ring tattoo!
Better yet let’s get Olympic Ring tattoos
For every one of our body parts.

We can hot tail it to the tattoo parlor
Downtown in our Ralph Lauren outfits,
Pick up a six-pack of Coca Cola on the way
And pay for it all with our Visa Card.

What say? You in?

An argument with a flat-earther
is an argument you cannot win.
No matter how many times you assert
that the earth is round, he will says its flat.

And, because the flat-earther is strong
in stamina and fierce in self-belief,
he will always get in the last word
which means he wins, you lose.

Your best option?
Admit defeat, walk away.

Don't believe you can ****
half a million Americans, get filthy rich
in the process and walk away scot-free?

Check out the Sackler family.

Sick of it yet?

Take a "moderately gifted" child,
expose him to a crazy stepmother
and let nature take its course.
Mission accomplished.

They laughed when, hands
bound behind his back,
he ran deliberately headfirst
into a wall to try and escape
the pain

When it didn't work
they jeered and mocked

He wasn't getting off that easily

She comes to my dorm room
from a frat party,
face flushed
stinking of beer.

She rubs herself against me,
tells me how much she loves me,
misses me.

I let her calm down a little
before I ask her,

"So, who've you been
making out with this time?"

You give them money
and, for a minute or two,
they pretend to like you.

Most, if not all of them, despise you.
Who can blame them?

Ask if you like,
But the answer is no.

I'm with Brother Beavis
on this one

Listening to the song
"Shiny Happy People"
makes me feel kind
of shiny and happy

Listening to it makes me want
to step away from the ledge,
to take the gun barrel out of my mouth,
to unhook the hose from the exhaust
pipe and open the car windows,
to put the cap back on the bottle of pills,
to pull my head out of the noose,
to put away the razor blade

Yeah, I know it was written tongue in cheek
and meant to be ironic, satiric or whatever

Don't care, it makes me feel good

Are a house on stilts
in shifting sand
in the path of a tsunami

Behold the expendable character
Who’s death is designed to help establish
The putative high stakes of the show.

Cue Walter, a homicidal monster.
Little nuance here. Sneering, lecherous,
He’s due a satisfyingly violent demise.

And there’s absolutely no danger
In giving him one.

Remember Eden,
The Tree Of Life,
the forbidden fruit.
Remember Commandments.

"Thou shalt not invade
and subjugate a sovereign country.
Thou shalt not fire upon civilians.
Thou shalt not threaten nuclear war."

Take note little KGB stooge:
The territory you covet
does not belong to you.

"Thou shalt not drop bombs
on schools and hospitals.
Thou shalt not torture dissidents.
Thou shalt not ****** journalists.
Thou shalt not exploit and steal
from you own countrymen."

Little Butcher, Little Troll:

This time, you've gone too far.
This time, you've done it.

Ukraine is not yours to pilfer.
The good citizens will defeat you.
You will not and cannot win.

And on Judgment Day,
The God you disdain will
have something to say.

Wouldn't want to be you Mr. Putin.

Start with a little girl's muddy drawers,
toss in some dialect, stir in some Shakespeare

Add the bellowing of an intellectually challenged man

Add a suicidal sibling, a sassy young black boy,
a dose of Southern ambience and wallah

You're William Faulkner

To any of you women
who ever voted Republican
in a Presidential Election

To Susan Collins
who claimed to believe
the assault allegations
of a credible women
(sorry sweetie, doesn't matter)
then gave a thumbs up
on the Supreme Court nomination
of a lying, would-be ******
who only failed because
he was too drunk to pull it off

To any of you pro-lifers
who are fine with telling
an eleven-year old ****** victim
to carry a child to term
(sorry sweetie, that's your
problem not ours) or
"you shouldn't have let
yourself get *****"

Congrats and have a nice life

It would be cool
To be a rhyming fool
To rhyme sappy
With happy
To rhyme hullabaloo
With Picachu
To rhyme resurrect
With circumspect
To rhyme yellow
With mellow
To rhyme dirigible  
With incorrigible
To rhyme hellacious
With salacious
To rhyme Jocasta
With pasta
To rhyme moon
With buffoon

And best of all
To make the call
To rhyme maybe
With baby

Then salute the purple cow
In the audience and take a bow

Disclaimer: It's a hard
and dangerous job and there
are plenty of good cops
and God bless them
but as for the others:

Cops Lie.
They lie and lie.
They even lie when there is video.
They lie even when their lies
are plain to see.
Clearly, the blood and broken nose
are from the victim smashing
his own face into the pavement.
The welts from repeatedly ramming
his head into that peace officer's baton.

If Attila the *** were a cop,
the police union would vigorously
defend his innocence.
He's a fellow officer, after all.
And if anyone on the force,
including the Police Chief,
disagrees the Union backers will
do their darndest to get him fired.

Now, imagine how much worse
it was before cell phones, before video.

Brutal.

Meghan McCain
is correct on this one.

The Chinese elite raised
on repression, torture
and butchery, carry on
with repression, torture
and butchery.

But Big Money talks
and the IOC plays
a game of let's pretend.

And Peng Shuai?
Her ****** is probably
first on the list for when
they harvest her organs.

Since I pulled up stakes
and ditched this hellhole
chances are the only time
I'll soil the pages
of my s**y hometown paper
again will be in the obits
when I croak.

No more drunk and disorderly
notices. No more photos
of me at anti-government rallies.
No more of my letters to the editor.
No more misleading articles
about the squabbles with my
puke-faced neighbors or my
allegedly delinquent tax payments.

So go ahead you crap-heads and find
someone else to kick around.

This dog is long gone.

Blind faith, idolatry.
So tempting.

Though it's almost always misplaced.
Though our heroes always fail us.

Not their fault.
We expect too much.
We expect the impossible.

Open the cage door.
Let them go.

When he’s not sexually assaulting women,
Insulting war heroes, the disabled,
Veterans, Gold Star families

When he’s not hoarding
Classified documents, cheating contractors,
Hiring illegal immigrants, stiffing employees,
Kowtowing to dictators, chumming around
With Jeffrey Epstein and lusting after young girls
Who remind him of Ivanka at age thirteen

When he’s not committing tax fraud,
Filing for bankruptcy, peddling nuclear secrets,
Mocking evangelicals, threatening election workers
And his own vice president

When he’s not promising to build a border wall,
Selling products made in China,
Using campaign funds to pay his lawyers,
Conning his supporters into buying worthless
University degrees or contributing to his bogus
Charity foundation

When he’s not losing money hand over fist,
Packing the Supreme Court
Or trying to destroy the democracy,
I kind of like that little two-****** dance
Trump does at his campaign stops—

It’s kind of amusing

On some level even the most die-hard cultists
must realize that their orange-skinned Messiah
wants to burn down The Republic.

They're so angry they don't care.

They're smarter than the scientists
who've studied climate change for years.

They're smarter than the doctors
who've studied vaccines and viruses for years.

They're smarter than the intelligence officers
who've worked in the field for years.

They're smarter than any rocket designer,
any chemist, any physicist, any structural engineer.

And they're way, way smarter than you or me.

And what makes them so smart?
How do they know so much?
How did they discover THE TRUTH?

Why, they read all about it on the internet!

I didn’t go, you didn’t stay
We never went to Mandalay
I clasped my hands but couldn’t pray
And asked is this the Milky Way?

Like flies on stink.
Like hair on a gorilla.

The ghouls and goblins.
The rubberneckers. The media.

Here the camp.
Here the shrine.

They gasp. They cluck.
They repeat and repeat.

Until the next one.
Until they pick up and move on.

Who claimed he liked what I sent
And, though he can’t publish any of it,
Would like to see more I say
I’m sorry but this is pretty much
My best **** anything else I submit
Will, frankly, not be as good
So why should I bother?

Sign up.
Shorten your life.
Make an orthopod happy.

Are boring. And that's what gets you
into trouble. Out of sheer boredom
you drink too much, hit on women
with boyfriends, start arguments
about politics that turn into fights
and, toward the end of the night,
grow maudlin. You cry in your beer,
blubber over how your life
has been one big failure and,
eventually, drunk as a skunk, you puke
all over your shoes, slink off
to your apartment, pass out on the floor
and wake up the next morning
with a shiner and a hangover
wondering what in the hell happened.

Yeah, there's a mime,
a sad clown and, at the end,
the lingering shot
of a balloon, string trailing,
floating skyward until
it's a mere speck on the horizon.

But really it's about ***.
It's always about ***
and the pseudo-intellectual B.S.
you've come to expect.

Still, I've seen worse.

"You better watch out
you better not cry
better not pout
I'm telling you why
Santa Clause is coming to town

He's making a list,
and checking it twice;
Gonna find out who's naughty and nice.
Santa Claus is coming to town

He sees you when you're sleeping
He knows when you're awake
He knows if you've been bad or good
So be good for goodness sake!"

After the editor
dissected my manuscript
with a sharp red pencil,
he handed it back
and I said, "you killed it,"
to which he replied,
"it was already dead."

The **** Cheneys of the world
Start the wars but the young guys
Laid off from the paper mill fight
And die in them.

Sandusky, Cosby, Madoff:
the wives riding the gravy train,
turning a blind eye

Sandusky: hiding upstairs,
ears finger-plugged, humming
to herself--whatever the Big Goof
was up to down in the basement
with those young boys
none of her business

Cosby: Disarming
his accusers with fake charm,
posing as a good friend while studiously
ignoring all those silly allegations,
as if her Dearly Beloved Meal Ticket
really was America's Favorite Dad
and not America's Most Famous
Serial Roofie-em First ******

Madoff: Hiding assets,
mailing her kids a million dollars
worth of jewelry and trying to keep
it a secret, on TV, she's so, so sorry,
never suspected a thing (okay Pinnochio)
moving now into a pricey mansion,
snacking on caviar again

And the victims? Too **** bad

Desiring a long life,
I renounced Pleasure,
Distraction, Fun--

Like a Buddhist monk--

And offered my delinquent
but pliant body
to the waterboard,
the smoldering cigarette,
the clenched fist,
the medieval rack

In the dungeon basement,
screams unheeded,
the seconds passed like hours,
the hours like days,
the days like years,
the years like millennia,

Each excruciating moment
impossible to elide or ignore,

I felt as close to Eternity
as a mortal man can get

A fighter jet turns on the afterburners
but no false absence confuses me

The antidepressants I take
dull what I recall of pain

Though a ghost of it remains
though I see mostly clouds

Let's not kid ourselves,
it's a vice. Not
as destructive as snorting coke
or repulsive as Big Game
Trophy hunting but still a vice.

A quick high
that quickly wears off
followed by gloom
and postpartum depression.

Craving.
Hit.
High.
Withdrawal.
Depression.

The cycle repeats
ad nauseam.

Tried to quit.
So did you.

Sound familiar?

I was a little bored
With human narrators
So I told the AI to write
Me a novel from the point
Of view of the grass

I gave it a few minutes
Then started reading
Turned out to be
The best book ever

But that wasn’t ‘til
Twenty years from now
So you’ll just have to wait

I'm sorry. I have done
all that I can for you.
The surgeries. The chemo,
the bone marrow transplant,
the cocktail of toxic drugs,
each treatment more desperate
than the last, were to no avail.
I have consulted with colleagues,
scoured the medical journals.
I have wracked my brains,
explored every option.
If I could, I would move
Heaven and Earth to find you
a cure. But, alas, I cannot.
I am not God. I am only
a poor human being.
And so I must let you go.
I commend you to the angels,
to your friends and family,
To the hospice caretakers.
I wish you the best on this
your last journey the one that,
sooner or later, we all face.
I have failed you. forgive me.

How rich am I?
I wrapped my Royce
Around a tree
And walked away
Without a scratch.

A live lobster.
A *** of boiling water.

Don't do it.

What shocked her most
was how angry they were,
as if her very existence was offensive.

The gang of armed men
and their dogs hunted her down,
cornered her in an abandoned shack
outside of the city proper.

They dragged her by the hair,
ziptied her hands,
as if she were a threat,
as if she could fight back.

They beat and defiled her,
then put a bullet in the back of her head,
dismembered her body,
cut up the pieces and scattered them
across a fallow field.

A year passed before
they allowed her loved ones
to search for her remains.

When her family came to the field,
to everyone's great surprise,
all they could see was green.

Forget those silly Charmin commercials
Forget the family of bears

When you have mud ****
You can wipe until the end of time
And never get clean

Give up, surrender

And jump in the shower

Pet owners: got a dude,
a feller, a sweet male
cat, dog, pigaroo?

Choose tiny snip,
not big rip.

think about the clinic
and your boy,
your bestest buddy,
waking groggily
to the shocking absence.

Say no to mutilation.
Say yes to a vasectomy.

Let the boys be boys,
Save The Nads.

Is not a test or a game
or an experiment,
it's an inevitability.

Don't want to play?
Too bad, you don't have a choice.

Fix it. I can't fix it.
Fix it. I can't fix it.
Fix it. I can't fix it.

I can't fix it.

We talk about cold fronts
and warming trends.
We talk about imminent storms.

Hail, frost, wind.
The long hot summer.
We nod, smile, commiserate.

We talk about the weather
To keep from killing each other.

Is boring and hard.
There are those
you despise.
There are those
who despise you.
In the cattle car
classrooms and corridors,
you cannot avoid them.

The teachers are smart
but not too smart.
You, of course,
are not so smart.

The hours pass
like a slow moving
train filled with nothing much.
It is difficult to pay attention.

You will eventually move on,
but not really.

This is your life.
You will learn to like it.

Because next week’s coin flip
Is so important to the franchise,
I’m hiring a consultant to help me.

Looking through a stack
Of resumes, I’m liking this one:

“I have nearly forty years of experience
Advising clients on this topic.
I have witnessed thousands upon thousands
Of coin flips in hundreds of venues.
I have written dozens of papers
On probability and the various factors
Involved in making this difficult decision.
I will employ charts, graphs, metrics
And can explain in detail your options all
For a reasonable fee. Don’t try this
On your own. You need an expert.”

Yep. Think I’ve found my man!